Starfish
Civilization rests on the backs of its outcasts. So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have preadapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place. It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore. But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron. At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them―and by the time anyone else finds out, the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet...
Stats for nerds
16recommend
32mentions
25people
2011–2026years
59% recommend41% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Came for the Peter Watts reference, glad to see it! Starfish (1999) focused around this idea and it and it's sequels are well worth the read, IMHO.
- I recently re-read Starfish by Peter Watts and man that book rhymes a lot with current events.
- Watts is an excellent hard scifi author & a lot of his older writing -- including many short stories, the Rifters trilogy (Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth) and the excellent novel Blindsight are available to read here: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from the bridge" a few times -- IIRC on this episode with Peter Watts & Richard K Morgan (author of Altered Carbon), both authors discussed writing for video games. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watt...
- Surprised nobody mentioned ‘Starfish’ by Peter Watts.
- You can't mention the Juan de Fuca ridge without mentioning the claustrophobic 90s sci-fi psychological thriller "Starfish" by Peter Watts, which he graciously hosts in its full text for free on his delightfully Geocities-esque website: https://rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm
- Peter Watts novel Starfish, a stunning quarter century old now, has exactly that problem as part of its side plot. In a chilling detail relevant to today, it posits a black-box trainable neural network (biological in the book but an irrelevant difference overall) tasked with solving some of the big issues, which makes subtle links and determinations in the model which eventually end up potentially disastrous for human kind.
